


where the wild things are

by bildungsromantic



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Canonical Character Death, F/M, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, Violent Sex, arthur is a vampire and eames is a werewolf that's the AU, the cobbs are paranormal researchers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 05:12:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1927890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bildungsromantic/pseuds/bildungsromantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Eames stands to clean his plate, he asks Arthur, ‘How’d you get into the werewolf business?’</p>
<p>‘I could ask you the same.’</p>
<p>Eames turns on the tap, raises his voice. ‘Oh, that’s easy. Bad luck.’ The oily remnants of egg slide into the sink. ‘Your turn.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the wild things are

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in September 2010 over on Livejournal. Inspired by artwork by [aud-works](http://aud-works.tumblr.com), though I don't think the art is publicly available anymore.

  
_i. shines when the sunset shifts_   


  
Naked, Eames waits in the safehouse basement, already hungering, his limbs moon-bright, muscles all pulled tight in his body like a trip-wire. He turns his grimacing face up to the small window: slatted with bars, less than half a meter wide. The door at the top of the steps is reinforced with steel.  
  
Torn blankets all across the basement floor, the scent of shorn sheep and spilled blood — not his own, but one of his kind. Doglike and dirtlike, the smell sharpens in the air as the winter moon takes ownership of the sky.  
  
‘Midnight already?’ Eames tries to say. Tries to smile.  
  
But his nails are growing thickly yellow and too long, and his voice strangles in his throat. Sinews stretch, quick and excruciating; the bone in Eames’s nose fragments, but he can’t cry out; and then it’s the bones in his arms, then his femur, his tibia, his pelvis, crack crack  _crack_. Eames feels it all and also does not feel it — the pain is too great, and he can almost believe it is somebody else whose body has been broken apart and pieced back together all wrong. It almost  _is_  somebody else, but only almost. His broken spine snaps together; his throat forms a low  _oooo_ , but his vocal chords are raw and new.  
  
The moon through the window feels hot. Eames sniffs the air. It takes him under a minute to find the dead rabbits the French woman left for him, their necks all snapped and bodies limp.  
  


&

  
‘Darling,’ Eames says to the man who appears at dawn to carry him up the stairs, a dark-haired blur to Eames’s exhausted eyes. ‘Darling,’ he says, and it’s possible he’s hysterical, for the moon has only barely disappeared beneath the skyline, ‘I just don’t know how to thank you.’  
  
Eames thinks he sees the man frown. He hears a voice, somewhere above him, say, ‘Don’t mention it.’ Eames feels like he’s floating. ‘You should get some rest.’  
  
(The man’s body smells stale, a little like the must of an old cologne, but with an earthiness Eames can’t place. Peculiar, enough to make his nose itch, but not unpleasant. And Eames, smeared with rabbit blood and his own blood and the indelible scent of wolf, is not in a position to complain.)  
  


&

  
Breakfast is porridge and tea, steaming up to wet Eames’s chin. He woke around ten to find the Cobbs had bandaged him up right good, and now he’s got a plaster across his cheek and stitches in his thigh. The undersides of his fingernails are still the blackish brown of dried blood. He tries not to look at them while he eats.  
  
‘How long’s it been, Mr. Eames?’ says Mr. Cobb, who sits across from Eames at the round dining table, in the brightly painted kitchen, in the sweet French country home Cobb and his wife use to hide werewolves.  
  
‘Just Eames is fine.’  
  
‘And you can call me Dom.’  
  
Eames hadn’t met the mister the night before. He’s an American, and quite handsome in his clean-cut American way, though beside his elegant wife he’d look positively dowdy. The woman, Mal, has the kind of looks that could pierce a man straight through and leave him happily hanging on the sword. Dom Cobb certainly doesn’t seem too upset about that wedding ring round his young finger; and Eames would put down money that the man won’t ever regret it. Mal is not the sort of woman you regret.  
  
Pouring more tea into his cup and then into the chipped little cup in front of Eames, Cobb says, ‘So,’ and he waits.  
  
Eames nods. ‘It’s going on six months, this thing. Got bit back in July.’ (Winces at the memory. Doesn’t touch his left shoulder. Wants to. Sips his tea.) ‘Spot of trouble in August, of course, and when I put two and two together, I thought it best to get out of the house, away from my mum. Been traveling since — through Ireland, then back to the continent, ‘cross Germany and France. Ended up in Switzerland, where I met Nash.’  
  
He smelled Nash out in the street, knowing him by the way he moved and the way his voice sounded to Eames’s ears, by the way he sweated, even, and the way his face went cold when he saw Eames. They both must’ve felt it then, the sick sensation of the wolf’s movement, even beneath the afternoon sun, with weeks until the full moon.  
  
In a loud German-speaking café, Nash told him, voice shaky and hands like white spiders dancing on the table, that he was looking for a cure. He’d spent a fortune looking through Europe — Switzerland was a last stop — and now he was heading east. The Japanese, didn’t you know, were the only ones innovating anymore. All sorts of rumors on the internet about secret research conducted by one Mr. Saito at Proclus Global. Nash would do what he had to do to set things right.  
  
How long, Eames asked him, and Nash answered, Four years.  
  
Four years and he hadn’t realized what Eames knew after only one transformation: that it is in him now, the wolf; not just in him, but twined deep in his blood, wrapped round his arteries and veins, round his heart, his stomach, his throat, his brain; and the pain of the full moon comes not because the beast takes hold, but because the beast is trying to break out, to split from the man, when in fact the two are inseparable.  
  
(Eames has the reminder etched into his body: waxing waning full new: the moon that is always there, tattooed over his shoulder and down the length of his bicep. He had it done in Dublin, by a skinny woman with punk rock hair, who smiling said, Killer, when he told her what he wanted. The needle on his skin was a deep scratch, and the woman wiped away blood that smelled like ink.)  
  
Eames did not want to go to Japan with Nash, and Nash did not invite him. Fiddling with his coffee cup, all nervous breathing, Nash said that if Eames returned to France, there was somewhere he could stay for the moon, if he needed. If you’re the type that likes to muzzle yourself, he said. Eames said he was, and Nash did not inquire, only wrote down an address on a coffee-dripped napkin.  
  
‘Nash,’ says Cobb, putting down his cup, ‘is bound for trouble.’ Worrylines in his forehead smooth away faster than a blink. ‘But I’m glad to hear you saw him. He used to come here every month like clockwork. Then he just stopped.’  
  
With a stretched-out smile, thinner than he might have managed the day before, Eames says, ‘I hope I haven’t been too much of a bother, showing up here. I know you can’t have been expecting me.’  
  
‘It’s no bother. It’s what we’re here for. Now — ’ Standing up, straightening his tie. ‘ — I’ve got to be going. There’s food in the fridge, and you’re welcome to stay here another couple days if you’ve got a slow recovery time. We’ve learned over the years that it varies.’  
  
‘You’re going?’  
  
Cobb half-shrugs, explains, ‘We’ve got a toddler and an eight-month-old at home. I don’t like being gone too much.’  
  
A shock runs through Eames, remembering the warm milky smell of the woman last night. A young mother, but she’d shown no fear, unlatching the door and letting him inside, showing him down to the cool, dark basement with something very like kindness. She was there all night, above him, listening to his whines as he scratched himself open and bit ‘til he bled, listening to be sure all the safety measures held. (He does not know when the dark-haired man came, or where he has gone.)  
  
‘But,’ says Eames through one last confusion, ‘you don’t live here?’  
  
Head shaking no, Cobb laughs, a funny kind of unfunny sound. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘The house belongs to Arthur.’  
  


&

  
Dark-haired, pale-faced Arthur drifts into the kitchen at dinnertime, and doesn’t look interested when Eames offers to make him a sausage omelet like the one he’s eating. ‘You’re still here,’ is what he says, his voice deeper than Eames remembers or expects.  
  
‘I am,’ Eames says, with his fork halfway to his mouth. He spent most of the day sleeping, sprawled out in the same back bedroom where he’d woken up. ‘Cobb said it would be all right for a day or two. Though, I s’pose, this being your house and all, you’re the one I ought to ask. Arthur, right? I’m Eames.’  
  
Arthur looks Eames up and down. ‘You’re looking better than when I last saw you, Mr. Eames, but you stink of medicine.’ He doesn’t smile then, but Eames can tell it’s a near thing, a sort of promise of a smile, a shadow where it might form. Eames suspects he has a face naturally inclined to seriousness, with all the possibility of great humor. He can see why he called Arthur darling. There’s something precious in such studied coldness.  
  
‘Medicine? That’ll be the patch job. Scratched myself up a fair bit, as you might remember.’  
  
Arthur nods. He’s wearing a dress shirt and a slate-gray tie. It surprises Eames that Arthur managed to carry him up the tall staircase; he’s slim, not skinny, but even the lean muscle that Eames knows is there, buttoned-down beneath white cotton, should not be enough to lift the bulk of Eames’s body. Even his body post-transformation, all brittle-boned and stretched out, naked as a baby.  
  
The thought makes Eames want to tease. ‘Got a good eyeful of me, huh?’ he says. He winks, even. There is something about this Arthur darling. He wants to see him smile.  
  
‘Don’t flatter yourself. You’re a puppy.’  
  
Eames likes the insult, and says as much, but Arthur just rolls his eyes. Still, he sits down at the table, looking at Eames with his brown eyes, watching him eat. The omelet is a touch undercooked, but not so bad after half a dozen raw rabbits. Eames looks back at Arthur. Straight spine, almost military, and really very pale. Attractive, certainly, but it’s a bewildering attractiveness, neither as conventional as Cobb’s nor as striking as Mal’s. It’s unassuming, dangerous in its ability to surprise you. Arthur keeps his mouth pressed closed while Eames finishes his meal.  
  
When Eames stands to clean his plate, he asks Arthur, ‘How’d you get into the werewolf business?’  
  
‘I could ask you the same.’  
  
Eames turns on the tap, raises his voice. ‘Oh, that’s easy. Bad luck.’ The oily remnants of egg slide into the sink. ‘Your turn.’  
  
From his chair, Arthur hmms. ‘I suppose it was Dom and Mal. Her father’s done all kinds of research on people like — you, mostly, but not exclusively. Wolves are easier to come by. Stupider,’ he clarifies, a petty jab that Eames finds amusing despite himself. ‘Wolves don’t know what they’re doing. They’re more human than not, and it makes them believe there’s — ’  
  
‘A way back?’  
  
‘Exactly. They put themselves in the hands of renegade researchers who rarely consider keeping them alive a priority. Miles is an exception,’ Arthur hastens to add. Nodding, Eames finds his chair again, watching Arthur’s mouth move, watching Arthur speak. His teeth are white and sharp. ‘Miles is a good man. But he knows there isn’t a way back. Not for any of us.’  
  
Could’ve misheard, but he doesn’t think he did. ‘Us?’  
  
Another almost-smile. ‘You didn’t think werewolves were the only creatures of the night you had to worry about, did you?’  
  
‘Let me guess,’ Eames says. He feels Arthur is taking him in with his eyes; the touch of his gaze crackles beneath Eames’s skin. ‘Pale.’ He lifts a finger. ‘Well-dressed.’ He lifts another. ‘Youthful appearance. Not a fan of home cooking.’ Two more. ‘And, darling, I’m afraid to say, smells a little like a cemetery.’ Last finger. ‘Dear God, I do believe you’re the return of Teen Witch.’  
  
For an instant, it’s there: a flash of a grin, a dimple cut into his cheek as if out of marble. And then he looks down and it’s gone.  
  
‘A vampire with dimples,’ Eames says. ‘Isn’t that unexpected?’ Against his will, his voice does sound a little wondrous.  
  


&

  
Arthur’s house, a sprawling, old, creaky thing, with big windows draped with thick curtains and at least three large bedrooms, sits deep in the countryside, about three-quarters down a long dirt lane. Eames drinks French beer and listens to the nightsounds, unlike anything he ever heard back in London. He’s on the sofa in Arthur’s sitting room, spread out, bottle nursed to his chest.  _Hoot_ , cries the sky,  _hoot shriek_ ,  _hoot skreee_ ,  _hoot crick crick creek_. The beer is called Desperados.  
  
Every now and then, Eames lifts his eyelids to peek through his eyelashes. A smudge in his vision: Arthur, leaning back in a desk chair, reading  _The Thin Man_  by Dashiell Hammett; with his eyes downcast toward the page, face like an impressionist painting, all dark, heavy lines and bright spots of skin. A curiously schoolboyish pose, with the front legs of his chair off the ground.  
  
Eames thinks about what Arthur said in the kitchen in his steady voice, about being a vampire, about how it was more like the movies than you’d expect, about how Miles had taught him what his weaknesses were, what would kill him, what he needed to do to survive. ‘And what’s that?’ Eames had asked, and when Arthur looked at him, his eyes seemed black.  
  
‘I have some reading to catch up on,’ he’d told Eames, and Eames followed him to the sitting room, expecting Arthur to pull Shakespeare or Dumas off the shelf, or maybe he was more of a Joyce type; but instead Eames was ignored for a pulp mystery about a couple of alcoholics. Arthur hasn't looked up from the page since.  
  
The beer is sweet on Eames’s breath, and a little thick, and Eames finishes off the bottle. Silently he thanks Mal or Cobb, whoever bought the beer knowing it would unfocus his pain, let it soften a little. He heads to the kitchen for another.  
  
It’s almost eleven when Arthur stands and leaves the room, his shiny black shoes effortlessly quiet as Eames watches him walk down a hallway that Eames hasn’t explored. Eames thinks about pulling a book off the shelf — he thinks he spots Forster beside the complete works of Graham Greene, and in school  _Howards End_  was his favorite. But his mind has gone fuzzy at the edges, the threads between his thoughts all thin and unsteady. He supposes he is too tired to read, and the yawn that cracks his jaw tells him he supposes right.  
  
Eames is almost asleep when Arthur reappears in the sitting room. ‘I’m going out,’ he says. He’s pulled on a suit jacket and an overcoat, both black, and he looks the proper modern vampire now.  
  
Eames blinks, sits up. Blinks again. ‘To hunt?’ he asks.  
  
Arthur’s hands, pale like the rest of him, smooth over the front of his jacket. There are three silver-edged buttons stamped down his chest.  
  
He says, ‘Yes.’  
  
‘Humans?’  
  
No pause; no wasted breath: ‘Yes.’ (A funny thought, there, whether Arthur has any breath to waste.)  
  
Eames asks, ‘Do you kill?’ and his tone is unaffected, no gasp of the horror he might’ve once felt.  
  
‘I try not to,’ Arthur says, turning and stepping out into the foyer, stepping out the front door which clicks quiet when it’s closed. But Eames doesn’t hear a car start up, so he hurries to the door, and fumbling the lock open finds only darkness, thick and all-encompassing.  
  


&

  
Inside, Eames drinks one last beer. He’s killed before: two people, two friends back home, on the first night he transformed. He clawed out their hamstrings so they couldn’t run, crushed their skulls between his teeth, slit their bodies into ribbons and left them like that, blood-spattered in their flat for their roommates to find the next morning. He woke up naked in a back alley, face smeared with red.  
  
Could’ve been much worse: could’ve been home, with Mum, could’ve torn her to pieces. He packed a bag while she was at work, clothes and all the cash he’d ever stashed away and his fake ID from when he was sixteen, printed with an alias. Fled to Ireland that night, knowing he’d be wanted for murder by morning.  
  
He goes by a different name now. The same punk rocker who inked him set him up with a brand new identity.  
  
He killed her, too, the very next day — tracked her through the streets of Dublin, until, alone on a twisty little road, he put a bullet through her brain. She knew too much; the police would get to her eventually. It was the only way.  
  


&

  
Shuffle, shuffle, bridge.  
  
It’s near three when Arthur returns, but Eames is still awake. Sober now, having made himself a cuppa. Teas of every sort can be found in Arthur’s cupboards: orange chamomile, Chinese green, English breakfast, chai, oolong, lemongrass, each in a small tin labeled with its name. Would almost mistake him for an Englishman, Arthur darling, though he has a small tin with coffee as well, and probably can’t drink any of it, besides.  
  
Eames is drinking English breakfast tea, nothing added, and is shuffling the deck of cards he found in a drawer next to the refrigerator. Shuffle, shuffle, bridge. When Arthur steps in to see why the light is still on, looking no different than when he left except for the way he holds himself, a bit looser, less like there is a gun pressed against his tailbone, Eames says, ‘Wanna play?’ He doesn’t meet Arthur’s gaze, watching instead his own hands shuffling the cards.  
  
The name of the game is Heads Up — two-man poker. They bet with 2c Euros and IOUs, mostly, and the few poker chips Arthur finds at the bottom of his junk drawer. They don’t talk much, just sit in silence in the night, watching the cards turn over on the table.  
  
Arthur is winning. ‘You need to work on your poker face,’ he tells Eames. Arrogant, supercilious, but not as untouchable or as unreadable as before. That not-quite smile has made a reappearance. ‘Now, Mr. Eames, do you wanna bet that last chip so we can finish this up?’  
  
Eames says, ‘No,’ and pockets the chip. He’s saving it for next time.  
  
  
  


_ii. a hideous thing inside_

  
In Paris, Eames has found a room in a boarding house where he can live for cheap, among a bunch of art students and bitter, divorced men. They all smoke, all the time, and now that his mum isn’t around to complain, Eames picks up the habit again. He even gets a job, for two days, selling shoes, before he decides picking pockets is easier — a habit as instinctive as smoking, and, like smoking, learned in the lean years of his adolescence.  
  
The American girl who lives down the hall sometimes stops by his room, smiling and shy at first, before she figures out that Eames is quite fond of her. ‘It’s so nice to speak English again,’ she sighs, dropping into the brown chair Eames fished out of a dumpster. All of her roommates speak English near-fluently, she explains to him, but they have a way of looking at you when you try to speak it with them. ‘It makes you feel like scum.’ She shakes her head, laughs, and asks Eames for something to drink. Ariadne drinks Coca-Cola, which Eames has started stocking in his mini-fridge just for her.  
  
Her chatter, pleasant and intelligent, fills up the evenings, distracting Eames from any of the bad decisions he’s so tempted to make — the filthy bars where he’ll drink himself into idiocy, the illegal poker games where he’ll wager money he doesn’t have. Instead, when he learns that Ariadne studies architecture, they talk about the gothic peaks of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, and the way London buildings feel so different than buildings of any other city. Eames tells Ariadne about the flat where he grew up (ugly thing, never saw any of the renovation money that shined the other parts of the city); and Ariadne talks about the tall, sloping structures they have all over San Francisco, where she’s from, and the way you have to build with the hills, not against them.  
  
When he sees her out the window some mornings, on her way to class, he calls to her to put on her mittens. The feeling of it startles him. He thinks it startles her, too: looking up at him from the street, her round face almost like a moon.  
  
And then a month has passed, and it is time to drive his rusty motorcar back to the country house with the dungeon basement. His car only plays cassette tapes, so, accelerating down the long road to the house, he mumbles along to Smiths songs he hasn’t liked since he was a teenager.  
  
It’s almost sunset by the time he arrives. Mal welcomes him in with a ‘So lovely to see you again’ and a kiss on the cheek. She takes his bag. Again he smells a sour milky scent on her and now he knows what it is, flustering at the thought of keeping her from her family and hiding the fluster behind his big-toothed grin.  
  
‘Mrs. Cobb,’ he says, ‘you are looking ravishing as ever.’ Noticing Arthur, a dark pillar in the shadows at the back of the foyer, with his arms folded and his mouth pulled into a dour frown, Eames adds, ‘Though not quite as ravishing as my dear Arthur.’ He waves his hand at Arthur as if it held a kerchief or a ribbon, a medieval token of love for a silver knight. Dark eyes flash at him then look away, and Eames barely bothers to conceal his delight.  
  
Smirking, Mal reminds Eames of a grown-up version of Ariadne. She says, ‘Well, your dear Arthur will show you downstairs.’ She looks at her gold wristwatch. ‘It’s twenty minutes until sundown, but you have hours until midnight.’  
  
Transformation’s a tricky, inexact business: usually Eames won’t change until midnight, but once or twice, it was only eleven, ten-thirty, once only nine o’clock. Probably something to do with time zones and internal clocks, but whatever the case, Eames likes to play it safe and lock himself up by the time the moon shows its face. Losing track of time is too easy otherwise.  
  
‘Come on, Mr. Eames,’ says Arthur from where he lurks. ‘I don’t have forever.’  
  
Eames smiles. He actually managed a joke. Eames knew there was a sense of humor under all that fine tailoring.   
  
‘After you,’ says Eames, with a flourishing bow, rising in time to see the rigid line of Arthur’s back heading toward the door to the staircase. Eames appreciates the view for a moment before he follows.  
  
Arthur’s deft fingers work through the locks in seconds, and he pulls the heavy door open without even looking like he tried. But Eames catches him looking back at him, checking if he’s suitably impressed.  
  
Down the stairs, long and narrow, Eames sees the basement, thinks of what will happen there. He touches his shoulder. He descends with Arthur close behind him, close enough that his breath would stir Eames’s hair if Arthur had any need to breathe.  
  
The same blankets, the same smell of blood and wolf, and now his own scent, too, thick in the air. Eames glances at the window and sees, with surprise, a dark sheet pinned over it. For Arthur, of course, so Arthur can be down here while Eames prepares. Eames doesn’t mind: the view of the sky is for the wolf in him, for the wolf who loves the heat of the moon.  
  
‘Strip,’ comes Arthur’s voice from behind Eames, all neutral and flinty, but when Eames turns to him, his eyes are averted.  
  
‘Why, Arthur, I had no idea you felt that way.’  
  
Arthur shifts his gaze back to Eames. His mouth curls up. ‘Just strip,’ he says, and the words have a soft edge this time.  
  
Clothes come off quickly, zippers unzipped and buttons unbuttoned, cheap fabrics all bunched together and pushed into Arthur’s arms. He frowns down at the pile. ‘What is this pattern even supposed to be?’ he asks of the shirt that slips too smooth between his fingers. He looks up again at Eames, and Eames sees his eyes flick over his body — muscular, naked, marked with tattoos and innumerable scars, not all of them left by the wolf.  
  
Arthur turns back to the staircase and stops on the first step. ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay with you,’ he says. He sounds like he means it.  
  
‘Hey, no problem. Wasn’t expecting you to.’ Eames cocks his head a little, and shows his teeth in a smirk because he doesn’t know what else to do. Arthur’s eyes barely seem to touch him.  
  
‘Listen,’ Eames calls when Arthur’s almost at the top of the staircase. Arthur’s face peers down at him, inhuman in the light, in the angle of the shadows. ‘I know you run a good business, but that woman up there, she has a family. You’ve got a back-up measure, haven’t you?’  
  
A nod. The shadows slide around his cheeks. ‘I’m a very good shot, Mr. Eames, and I only shoot silver bullets.’  
  
‘Good,’ Eames says, and waits until he hears the door close before he breathes again.  
  


&

  
It’s still Mal there in the morning, spreading jam across warm pastries and telling Eames he got off relatively light this time around. ‘A few scratches, bite marks, but nothing needing stitches.’ She pushes a croissant at him. ‘And how did you sleep?’  
  
He slept well. Must’ve passed out the moment he changed back, because he doesn’t even remember Arthur carrying him back upstairs, though he woke up in the same bed as last time, soft and warm, the smell of clean sheets. The smell of Arthur, too, somewhere on the air.  
  
Mal did not sleep so well; he thinks she did not sleep at all. The skin beneath her eyes is dark, her face pale with a shine to it, but she does not look any less alert. She explains that Cobb is down with a cold and running short on energy, so she left him with the only slightly less daunting task of watching over their children. Cobb didn’t have a say in it at all, Eames can tell.  
  
‘What about Arthur?’ Eames asks. He bites into the croissant and has to pause a moment to take in how good it is, buttery and hot, sweet but not too sweet. Enough to wash away the memory of blood in his mouth. After he swallows, he says, ‘Isn’t he up with you already? He could do it on his own.’  
  
Mal lowers her eyes. She shakes her head. ‘It’s not good for Arthur to go without food for a whole night. He would be too weak. Either Dom or I must be here, so that he may leave, if he needs to.’  
  
Wiping butter from his chin, Eames says, ‘But he told me — he promised me that he’s around, in case something goes wrong.’ At Mal’s inscrutable look, the kind beautiful women manage easily because beauty is always confusing, Eames explains, ‘Said he has a gun. Silver bullets.’ He shrugs, keeps his tone light. ‘What if something happens while he’s out — feeding?’  
  
‘We call it  _eating_ , Mr. Eames. Just the same as you or I do.’ The sweetness in her voice leaves a nervous feeling in Eames’s stomach. ‘And I assure you that I can fire a gun. I only hope I will never have to prove it to you.’  
  


&

  
‘Come now, Arthur, couldn’t you show just a little mercy?’  
  
‘I’m afraid not, Mr. Eames,’ Arthur says, leaning forward to drag the last of Eames’s chips across the table to join his winnings. ‘You’ve lost. Again.’ Arthur went out to eat early this evening, leaving Eames to start that Forster book he eyed last time, and he returned just after midnight, bringing with him a box of poker chips. He’s won three successive games.  
  
Eames pulls a face, only a little disgruntled. ‘You’re cheating. I don’t know how but you are.’ Arthur’s lips press closer to together, stifling a smile. ‘You are! You bloody bastard. You have x-ray vision, haven’t you?’  
  
When Arthur laughs, it’s like Eames is seeing it out of the corners of his eyes, like he can barely believe it’s really there. He’s afraid he’ll startle it away. ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Arthur says. Dimples like parentheses around his mouth, marking out his smile. ‘I’m a vampire, not Superman.’  
  
Eames says, ‘You get x-ray vision and all I get most of the time is an overactive nose.’  
  
‘I do not have x-ray vision.’ Arthur starts gathering the cards, aligning the edges with the palm of his hand. ‘And I’ve got the nose too.’ He sniffs. ‘You still smell like dog, by the way.’  
  
‘That’s not my fault!’ But Eames is laughing, and so is Arthur, but quietly, like he’s not meaning to. ‘I showered, but it just doesn’t go away. Besides, you smell like a coffin. You don’t actually sleep in one of those, do you?’  
  
‘No. I have a bed.’ The deck of cards slide toward him across the table. Arthur’s palm rests on top. ‘There’s a windowless room at the back of the house that I use. So: again?’  
  
There he is before Eames, his Arthur darling, and Eames wonders if this is how Arthur is with the Cobbs, this easy, this gentle. He wonders if maybe this side of him is just for Eames. ‘I guess all it takes to loosen you up is a couple games of cards,’ he says, touching Arthur’s hand instead of the cards. His skin’s not cold at all, just dry and soft.  
  
Face turned down to the table, Arthur says, ‘It’s been a long time since I played. Before — this life, I was something of a gambler.’ Eames sees the muscles in Arthur’s face move with the words. ‘I cheated, too, and only got caught half the time. I had a pair of loaded dice that I swear kept me fed for about three years. Then I cleaned up, joined the military, and then — this. I just forgot how fun it is to play.’ It’s enough to hurt, the way Arthur is looking up at Eames with his face that holds itself so proud, so distant, but which now is so open.  
  
Eames stands and pulls Arthur up by the hand, pulls Arthur so that he stands in front of Eames, close to him. Close enough that they can smell each other down past the doggy, dirty musks; the way their skin smells, too, the way the blood in their veins smells.  
  
‘You forgot how fun it is to win,’ Eames says.  
  
‘Yes, I guess so.’  
  
Arthur shakes when Eames reaches out to touch his face, actually fucking  _shakes_ , and when Eames leans into to kiss him it is like the taste of something pleasantly aged, like good wine uncorked after decades, straight to his head in just the same way. Eames tries to put his other hand to Arthur’s face, but a switch has flipped in Arthur, whose eyes flash, who bats Eames’s hands out of the way with his own. He grabs Eames by the hair and pulls him down to meet his mouth. His teeth are sharp against Eames’s lip, but his tongue is beautifully soft.  
  
‘I,’ he says, ‘oh, God.’ He breaks away.  
  
Eames gasps and tastes blood in his mouth. Not his own. Not the coppery kind of human blood he knows, either, but something sharper, almost alcoholic. ‘You bit yourself,’ he says.  
  
‘So I didn’t bite you.’ Arthur’s eyes are guarded again.  
  
‘Arthur,’ Eames begins, and Arthur says, ‘I’m sorry.’ He licks his own lips. There’s red at the end of his tongue.  
  
Eames looks at him and says, ‘Nothin’ to be sorry for, pet.’ He leans in again and sucks the welling blood off Arthur’s tongue, drinks the blood that Arthur drank earlier that night, and kisses the mouth that did the drinking. ‘Arthur,’ he mouths wetly across Arthur’s cheek, smearing blood across the pale skin, just because he likes the sound of his name.  
  
Arthur pulls Eames stumblingly back and back through the house, through the dark narrow hallway, to his windowless room. Eames can’t see anything at all, but his body goes oomph when he’s pushed onto a hard mattress by a strong hand. A lamp comes on, a small yellow glow. Arthur’s skin shines in the light. His cheek is still pink with blood.  
  
They lie in each other’s arms and kiss, just kiss, like teenagers, frantic with the slide of their mouths and heat of their hands on each other’s skin. In the low light of the room, they dare to learn each other. Eames spends a lot of time on the spot below Arthur’s ear, and Arthur kisses the junction between his neck and his shoulder, and then they find each other’s mouths again, pressed together until Eames has to stop to breathe.  
  
When Eames steps out to use the toilet, he notices there is blood on his shoulder where Arthur’s teeth scratched his skin but never bit down.  
  


&

  
Ariadne is taking a class called ‘Theoretical Architecture,’ where they create designs that can never be built. Over a baguette and some good cheese she splurged on, she tells Eames about Penrose staircases and buildings tall enough to actually scrape the sky. Eames half-listens, but he heard her roommates whispering in French when he passed by, thinking he couldn’t understand, and he doesn’t want to deceive the girl.  
  
‘Ariadne,’ he says, when she stops to tear off a chunk of bread. She smiles at him, and it’s as if by instinct. She reminds him so much of his mother, he thinks, how he imagines his mother might’ve been as a young woman. She reminds him of Mal, too. ‘I hope you know that it’s been wonderful being your friend. Oh, lord, this is already off to a bad start. Look, I just want to make sure — ’  
  
‘They got to you, didn’t they?’ Ariadne shakes her head. Eames can tell she finds this deeply amusing. ‘My roommates are ridiculous. Don’t worry about it, Eames. I figured out pretty early on that you’re gay.’ She hesitates, then asks, ‘You are, aren’t you?’  
  
Eames tears off some of the bread, almost laughing. ‘Keen, aren’t you? Bet you’re at the top of your class. Yes, by and large, it’s the male species that attracts, though there’s been the rare occasional lass who charmed me into her bed. But, Ariadne, you are — ’  
  
‘Just a girl. I know.’  
  
‘ _Au contraire_.’ He is so very fond of her. ‘You are too much of a woman for me. And besides,’ he says, his eyes sliding toward hers, the grin already spreading, ‘I think I might be seeing someone.’  
  
Ariadne throws her bread at his face for not telling her sooner.  
  


&

  
But it’s not a relationship, exactly, him and Arthur. Eames doesn’t know what it is. After the kissing, after Eames insisted on holding Arthur close to him, to listen for a heartbeat that wasn’t there, after dawn rose and Arthur drifted to sleep and Eames looked at him and felt like he was looking at a corpse — breathless and unmoving — Eames left the house in the country. While he drove, he listened to French radio, thick with static until he was just outside Paris. He thought about the note in his handwriting that waited on the kitchen table for Arthur to find — a note with the boarding house’s telephone number and without a signature.  
  
Arthur didn’t call, but one night he appeared outside Eames’s door. Two o’clock. He’d already eaten. He stood in the doorway, almost leaning but never quite, and he said, ‘You live like a bum,’ with a sneer down the hallway of the boarding house. Eames didn’t let it bother him. Eames knows that Arthur doesn’t let anything come easy.  
  
Arthur never sees the inside of Eames’s room, even when Eames remembers vampire lore and invites him in. He lets Eames breathe cigarette smoke at him, lets kiss him over the threshold, all slow and affectionate, and Eames feels Arthur’s thin fingers brush over the back of his neck, or over his shoulder, his tattoo, down the length of his arm. And then Arthur’s gone again, like he was never there, except for the lingering feeling in Eames’s stomach, a feeling all too much like hunger.  
  
Tonight, Arthur wears a double-breasted jacket and a tie striped navy and white, and with his black hair all slicked back to perfection, Eames wants very much to undo him. He imagines how Arthur might looked naked, like a completely different animal. Remembers his exposed wrists and bare throat, usually collared and cuffed.  
  
If Eames had any say at all, Arthur would come inside, into the room where Eames lives, and he would smile, and they would play cards and maybe have sex, and Arthur would not be shaking his head and saying, for the third time this week, and the twelfth time this month, that he should really be going.  
  
‘Arthur,’ Eames says, and catches Arthur’s hands before Arthur disappears. ‘What are you doing? You do like me, don’t you?’  
  
Mouth pressed together, eyes hard like rocks, Arthur doesn’t answer.  
  
Eames takes a drag of his cigarette. ‘It’s all right.’ He leans in, and touches his lips to Arthur’s temple. ‘I know you’re trying.’  
  
There is no point asking how Arthur knows where he lives. No point asking why he’s here. Eames will take what he can get.  
  
When he leaves, Arthur says, ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’ Eames nods. Touches his tattoo. Thinks of the filling moon.  
  


&

  
Monday is fiercely windy, and in the morning Eames watches out the window as Ariadne’s scarf tangles through the air until she tucks it into her jacket. She has an exam in the afternoon that she spent most of Sunday studying for in Eames’s room. He imagines her knocking on his door tonight, her face all aglow, mouth already open to tell him that she’s aced it. But he will be in the countryside by then, with Arthur, yes, and also with a body that will shatter and shape itself anew.  
  
Eames packs his usual bag: a change of clothes, shampoo, a bar of soap, a toothbrush. He brings condoms and lube, too. He doesn’t know what to expect. He can see that Arthur wants, but Eames doesn’t know  _what_  he wants.  
  
On the drive to Arthur’s house, the wind slides along the sides of Eames’s car, making sounds he wishes to understand; but he can’t tell if the wind is saying  _go-o-o_  or  _no-o-o_ , or if it is merely the long low moan of nature, holding no meaning at all. He shakes his head, checks his watch. An hour until sundown, and his car pulls up the lane that leads to the house.  
  
Mal lets him in. Arthur is not there. Tea is offered, smiles are shared, tales of mishaps with the children and wistful remarks about the Cobbs’ most recent anniversary, talk of Paris and its beauty and Paris and its ugliness, the two of them Mr. Eamesing and Mrs. Cobbsing, more-sugaring and why-thank-youing, sipping and stirring, until Eames looks at his watch and says, ‘I think it’s time,’ and Mal nods, her face grave.  
  
She unlocks each of the locks on the basement door, and Eames hoists it open. Thirteen steps to the bottom. Eames changes out of his clothes, haphazardly folding them before he hands them to Mal, who has not turned her back to him. ‘Good luck,’ she says. ‘Dom will be here in the morning.’  
  
‘Thanks,’ Eames says with a jovial wave, watching her ascend. She’s dressed in black like an angel of death. He looks at the cement. Sniffs.  
  
And between the dirt and the damp and the blood, there is Arthur: the scent of him like a curl of smoke through the air.  
  
The little window is covered up with the cloth again, and Eames stands on his tiptoes to pull it down. The sun is almost set. Light bleeds through the sky.  
  
‘You should go,’ says Eames.  
  
Arthur, behind him, is made of shadows and stillness. The door did not open, he did not walk down the thirteen stair steps to Eames’s side, but Eames knows he is here now. Eames does not question it. ‘You really ought to go now, Arthur,’ he says.  
  
Arthur says, ‘No.’  
  
With a sigh, Eames turns. He can feel the pale shadow of the moon beginning to warm his skin as its light falls over his back. ‘Come now, don’t be so stubborn. I’ll still be here in the morning.’ There is, of course, a chance he is wrong, that the wolf will kill him in its attempt to free itself. Werewolves, he learned from Nash, rarely live past forty. Usually it’s their hearts that give out.  
  
In this light, in this place, Arthur seems paler, less human than usual. There is something frightening and angular and beautiful about his face. Something about the line of his cheekbones. Eames can’t remember his dimples. Eames feels too warm.  
  
‘You’ll be here in the morning.’ Arthur takes off his jacket. His shirt is the palest shade of blue Eames has ever seen. ‘But what will you be?’  
  
‘I’ll be me. Same as I’ve always been.’  
  
‘As fragile as you’ve always been. More fragile, even.’ With a single finger he loosens his tie. ‘I could snap you in half, Eames.’  
  
Eames tries to smile. ‘If that’s what you’re into, love.’  
  
But no, Arthur does not smile back; no, Arthur is not amused. His seriousness makes him seem younger, like a child trying on his father’s clothes, with his face held so rigidly. His hair has begun to fall out of place and into his eyes. ‘Do you really want me?’ Arthur asks.  
  
There is no answer but yes.  
  
When Arthur kisses him, it hurts — scraping him, bruising him, Arthur’s hand gripping hard on Eames’s bicep, Arthur’s nails sharp over his shoulder blade. The intensity of it shocks Eames. Arthur’s mouth is open and wanting, and the blood Eames tastes in the kiss is his own this time. Arthur’s hand slides over Eames’s prick, which has gone hard.  
  
Arthur pulls off his clothes faster than Eames can follow his movements, and Eames is warm all over at the sight, warm with blood, warm with the scent of Arthur. Eames wants to give as good he gets, to kiss with all the same force, to fuck him raw. Eames wants, everything in him wants — the wolf, too, wants.  
  
‘Jesus, Arthur, you have to — fuck — ’ Eames tries to say, but Arthur has him pressed to the ground by then. Arthur’s body moves like music over Eames, and Eames can barely keep himself together. His hips grind up and Arthur knows how to move with him, against him, moves before he even moves, dictates the movement. Arthur plays Eames’s body like a piano, runs his fingers down the keys.  
  
The moon is so hot through the window, Eames thinks he might burn.  
  
‘It’s dangerous,’ he says. ‘You have to go.’ But he’s desperately holding on to Arthur — clawing into him, his nails still short and pale, though Eames can almost feel the ghosts of the nails that will grow there. It is almost those ghosts that are spilling Arthur’s blood. The air smells sweet, and Eames knows this is the worst decision he’s ever made, the worst decision he can’t stop himself from making.  
  
Eames holds Arthur down and he licks Arthur open, and Arthur says, ‘Yes, yes,’ when Eames pushes into him. No condom, no lube, like the hurt of it is the point. They’re sticky with blood and sweat and pre-come. They bite each other’s lips. The moon is rising.  
  
And Eames has barely pulled out, cock dripping over Arthur’s legs, when his body seems to split open at the seams. He could scream, in this last second when his voice is still his own, but instead he cries, ‘Go!’ at Arthur, naked and too close, naked and too easy to strip to the bone. Oh, god, why is it so hot in this basement?  
  
Jaw breaking and nose extending and eyes focusing with a new precision, Eames watches Arthur vanish into darkness, and the wolf cries out for a meal lost. He laps up the blood that has spilled across the floor.  
  


&

  
Eames opens his eyes at dawn and feels like every part of his body has been put together wrong, like every nerve in his body is on fire. Next to his head he sees something black. It takes him a moment to recognize that it’s the torn sleeve of an expensive suit jacket.  
  


&

  
The car rattles on the way back to Paris. Eames doesn’t turn on the radio, doesn’t listen to the wind, listens only to the insistent thump of his heart as he speeds away from the country house, from Dom Cobb’s knowing eyes, from the vampire that he almost killed. Everything hurts more than it’s ever hurt before, the stitches across his face and in his arm and in his calf, the bruises across his stomach. There are bite marks on his chest and his shoulders that he knows he did not leave there.  
  
Cobb didn’t comment, didn’t have to. He gave Eames coffee out of spite and told him without prompting that Arthur was fine. Eames took his coffee and bowed his head and, ignoring the stiffness of his limbs and the throbbing in his head, he stepped out the door and didn’t look back.  
  
The day is overcast, threatening to rain, and by the time Eames arrives back at the boarding house, the sky has gone entirely gray. He climbs the stairs, wanting sleep and painkillers and alcohol, though he’s wiling to settle for two of the three. The hall is quiet — everyone’s in class or at work — but outside his door, Eames finds a copy of yesterday’s _London Times_. Ariadne buys it occasionally and gives it to him to read when she’s done. He picks it up, thinking of her.  
  
Thumbing through, swallowing mouthfuls of bourbon because it’s either that or the last of Ariadne’s rum, Eames’s eyes drift shut. He sees the cement floor, Arthur’s body, Arthur’s blood. He opens his eyes again.  
  
There are several articles about the economy and another dozen about various military conflicts across the globe. There is a piece about the U.S. Secretary of State’s visit with the Prime Minister, and another piece about whether her shoes were fashionable or not. There is an article about a bank robbery some weeks earlier in which one woman was killed. The woman, Eames reads, was at the bank to apply for a loan; and between the lines it is made clear that she was a poor woman, merely trying to survive, dressed up in her best skirt and shoes (probably cheap and wearing out, but still her best), and by virtue of pure bad luck, the force which seemed to dictate her entire life, she was shot once through the heart. Eames reads the woman’s name and learns that she is his mother.  
  
And it is an unexpected grief, this knowledge, that the woman who sang him to sleep and scolded him daily, who drove away his brute of a father, the government man she was mistress to, when he began to slap Eames around — this woman is dead. He left to protect her, didn’t he, left to keep her safe from his extraordinary curse. But it was ordinariness that got her in the end, the need to buy groceries and keep the lights on.  
  
Eames shakes over his bourbon, which tastes curiously salty on his lips. His fingers can’t seem to hold themselves still, all shivery and wet with spilled drink, so he sets himself to work: digs out his suitcase and begins. He’ll leave the furniture behind. He’ll leave almost everything behind. He takes his clothes, his passport, two packs of cigarettes, a thick wad of cash he keeps hidden for emergencies. He folds the newspaper and sticks it inside the case’s front pocket. He picks up Arthur’s copy of  _A Passage to India_ , brought to him one night when Arthur visited and said he knew Eames wanted to read it; Eames tucks the book into the suitcase as well.  
  
He will go back to England, visit his mother’s grave. After that, he doesn’t know where he’ll go. Maybe he’ll track down Nash, track down this Mr. Saito, if only for something to do. Maybe he’ll go somewhere with casinos and alcohol, where the crowds are thick and theft is easy and, he thinks, looking out at the rain, where it is always sunny.  
  
Eames stacks the contents of his fridge outside Ariadne’s door. No reason for it to go to waste. Underneath the last of the Coca-Colas, he leaves a note:  _if youre ever in trouble call mal & dom cobb, theyll know what to do_. He hates the thought of leaving her in this city, without an ally, without a friend, speaking French with everyone and pretending to like red wine.

 

_iii. let it bleed_

  
‘Well?’ asks Yusuf, peering down at Eames over the edge of his clipboard. He is a dark smudge with white teeth and a white jacket, so Eames rubs his eyes. He comes away with blood on his hands. ‘How did it work?’  
  
Eames, groaning, trying to assess the damage, fixes him with a red glare. ‘How d’you think?’ It feels like his shoulder is dislocated, like his face has been scissored in half, like whatever ‘sedative’ Yusuf brewed this time did not exactly have the intended effect. In fact, it seems to be rather the opposite. Eames stands, stumbles to the sink, washes his face with cold water and coarse soap.  
  
‘I’m sorry about that. Your metabolism is nearly impossible to predict,’ says Yusuf, scribbling something down, ‘and I can do little more than guess how you will react to the drugs.’ He has concocted a series of compounds over the past several months — attempts at sedatives that left Eames without memories of the entire day leading up to the full moon, or that made him drowsy and incoherent once he transformed back again, or that sent him into a vicious rage, but nothing that has quieted the wolf. Eames isn’t surprised, isn’t expecting anything: Yusuf pays him for his participation, and for that reason alone, Eames allows himself to be drugged and studied. And, after so long, Eames has come to like Yusuf, too. The man is smarter than anyone he’s ever met, and he makes Eames laugh.  
  
‘If only I could conduct experiments directly on the wolf.’ He has cameras in the room where he locks Eames, the one he usually uses to conduct elaborate research on psychics, and he stays up all night watching Eames become the wolf, watching the wolf go wild. But, as Yusuf has complained again and again, it is not the same as direct observation and experimentation.  
  
Eames runs a finger over the bloody line cutting from just below his ear to the upper ridge of his lip. ‘Best of luck with that. Direct interaction has gone so well for me.’  
  
‘Eames.’ Producing a medical kit, Yusuf gestures Eames over to him a rollaway cot. ‘Come here.’  
  
Yusuf is not gentle — Payback for colonization, Eames suggested once, and Yusuf said, No, payback for being an insufferable arse — but he does a better job stitching Eames up and resetting his bones than Eames could do himself. The days of waking up in a bed, already on the mend, are long behind him. He still remembers the smell of that small room in that hidden-away house, the way it felt to ease his way to the kitchen and find breakfast made, tea boiling, conversation pleasant. He never wakes up expecting Mal or Cobb or Arthur, but he often wakes up missing them.  
  
He misses his mother, too, and can’t shake the sight of her simple grave, buried beside her mother and her father and her baby sister. Eames is meant to be buried there, but he suspects it will not happen. He’s not in that family anymore; he no longer bears that name, no longer bears any trace of that identity.  
  
After Eames left France, he forged a new passport and a new visa to get him into Kenya without being traced. He learned the skill in the wake of Ireland, not wanting to deal with loose ends anymore, and found he has a talent for it, an artistry, a remnant of his teenage years spent drawing in his school notebooks instead of writing anything down. Eames has a new name, too, but it doesn’t really stick: everyone he knows (and that’s mostly Yusuf and a few blokes who frequent the casinos) calls him Eames. But Eames is not the name his mother gave him, and it’s not a name she would recognize.  
  
‘You’ll live,’ Yusuf says when he’s done, ‘but I fear your good looks are forever ruined.’  
  
Eames smiles, a smile that stings with the stretch of it, where the skin needs to heal. ‘I think I look rather rugged.’  
  
‘Think what you like. Now, what can you tell me about your night?’  
  
The questions are the same every month, about what the sight of the moon did to him, how it felt, how the change felt, and how it felt to be the wolf, and whether he was lucid, and whether he felt detached, and when he was most excitable, and when he was most himself, and whether his instinct was to kill or to convert. He never knows how to answer the last question. His instinct is to bite, to tear, to claw, to feel the crunch of bone between his jaws and the slick heat of blood on his rough tongue. There is no thought of death or propagation, no choice — just the animal instinct to break.  
  
Upstairs, Yusuf runs his business, selling recreational drugs to wealthy customers and occasionally mixing medicines for friends unable to afford to see a real doctor. There is a couch in the corner of the room where Eames is allowed to recuperate after the full moon, with the understanding that he’s supposed to be keeping an eye on the door while Yusuf puts the downstairs room to rights before the subjects arrive. (Lately, it’s something to do with telepathic states and drug-induced shared dreams. Eames tries not to ask.)  
  
The couch is suspiciously green and much too small, but Eames manages, somehow. The cat jumps up beside him, Eames too tired to really mind. Its name is Shahrukh Khan, due to its supposed resemblance to the Bollywood actor; Eames doesn’t want to tell Yusuf, but he thinks the cat’s a girl and calls her Katherine Hepburn when they’re alone. It’s the aloofness, maybe. The wide eyes.  
  
Asleep, with the cat tucked up under his chin, Eames doesn’t hear the phone until the third ring, and when he starts awake, he thinks it is someone at the door. Too late anyway: Yusuf picks up, his pursed lips wondering why he bothers with Eames at all, but his eyes not quite so harsh. ‘Yes,’ he says into the receiver. ‘One moment.’ He holds the phone out in front of him and waits. When Eames doesn’t move, he says, ‘It’s for you.’  
  
Eames doesn’t know what to say to that. After a moment, he asks, ‘Who is it?’  
  
‘How should I know? She wants to talk to you.’  
  
He has never given anyone this number; he’s not even sure who knows that he and Yusuf are acquainted. He plucks the phone out of Yusuf’s hand. Part of him wonders if this is some kind of joke, except that Yusuf doesn’t look amused at all. He puts his mouth to the phone. ‘Yes?’  
  
‘Hello? Eames?’  
  
The voice is familiar, impossible. His breath catches and it takes him two attempts to get the name out: ‘Ariadne?’  
  
‘Eames. It is you, isn’t it.’ He can practically see her, at the downstairs telephone in the boarding house, keeping quiet so as not to bother the neighbors — and what time is it there, anyway? — with her hands in fingerless gloves and her neck wrapped round with a scarf. ‘Thank god someone picked up. I’ve been trying for days.’  
  
Yusuf spends most of his time downstairs, with the sleepers. He wouldn’t hear the phone ringing from down there.  
  
‘How — how did you get this number?’  
  
Ariadne answers, ‘From Arthur.’  
  
Eames’s heart goes still all at once, then roars back to life. ‘Arthur?’  
  
‘Arthur. Vampire. Doesn’t believe in business casual. You know.’   
  
He knows. The picture of Arthur is still so clear in his head, the incline of his head, the curve of his dimples, the nakedness of his body beneath Eames’s ravaging hands. The peaks of his lapels. The way his fingers look, shuffling a deck of cards. His way of knowing things, like the number where he can reach Eames, a number Eames certainly never gave him.  
  
‘You know Arthur?’ is all Eames can manage.  
  
‘Yeah. It’s sort of a long story that I can’t afford to tell at these rates. But listen.’ She sounds years older for a moment, tired and tragic, and Eames wishes he could be there with her. He never once hugged her. ‘I thought you might want to know,’ she says. ‘Mal Cobb has been turned into a vampire.’  
  


&

  
Perfectly brewed tea and perpetual grace, small children she could not speak of without smiling, a husband who adored her: this is what Eames thinks of when he thinks of Mal. Impossible to imagine her as Ariadne describes, vicious and dangerous and breaking Cobb’s heart with nothing more than the curve of her lips. Impossible to imagine how Cobb is handling this experiment — an interview with a vampire, a purely scientific endeavor — that has gone so horribly wrong.  
  
‘What’s being done?’ Eames asks.  
  
‘Cobb wants to find her. She shows up sometimes, like she wants her old life back, and then disappears again. He wants to capture her. See if anything can be done to — ’ Ariadne’s voice breaks. ‘She can’t be changed back, Eames.’  
  
‘I know.’  
  
‘I don’t know how to help him.’  
  
Eames twists the cord on his finger until it hurts. Yusuf is eyeing him with open curiosity. ‘What does he — what does Arthur say?’  
  
It takes Ariadne a few seconds to answer. ‘He says she’s not Mal anymore. He says that Cobb has to let her go. They’ve fought about it. I thought Cobb was going to shoot him for what he said. That Mal’s just a shade of herself now, that she’s — oh, shit.’  
  
‘Ariadne?’  
  
‘I have to go. I can’t afford much more time. But Eames — I’m sorry you have to know, but I thought you should. She was your friend, wasn’t she?’  
  
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘she was.’  
  
After he hangs up, Yusuf asks what has happened. ‘You look worse than you did this morning, and that’s saying something.’ He scratches Shahrukh Khan’s belly, his eyes serious despite the attempt at a smile on his lips, and Eames knows he would help if he could.  
  
But there aren’t words to explain that this life he thought he had left behind has come back for him, called him to it with a friendly voice and news that took the feet out from beneath him. The morning after he first changed, he cried. He thought it had been a dog bite, that night in the park, when he was too drunk to remember anything but the pain of teeth clamping over his calf. He still doesn’t know how he survived. The shock, the pain, the realization that he was no longer the man he had been for so many years — that he was something else, something new and inescapably violent — these come back to him again, thinking of Mal. Eames aches for Cobb and the children, but he wants to cry for Mal.  
  
‘Will I see you again?’ Yusuf asks when Eames turns to leave.  
  
‘Don’t know. One can hope.’  
  
They shake hands like men, like Yusuf has not seen Eames for what he is, like he does not care, and then Eames merges with the rushing crowds of the Mombasa streets, the sun in his eyes as he walks back to his tiny flat and the suitcase he has been living out of for almost a year. Already he is calculating the time it will take to get where he needs to be.  
  
  
  


_iv. feeding on fever, down on all fours_

  
Paris is not so far, the flight not so long, but Eames holds himself so tense that when he steps off the plane, his body does not want to uncoil.  _Crack_ , goes his neck when he looks up at the French sky;  _crack_ , go his knees when he ducks into a taxi.  
  
He pays the driver to drop him off the boarding house, because he’s not sure where else to go. It still looks like it might fall in, still smells like cigarette smoke and cologne, and beneath that the scent of mildew. Eames stands out front, considers going inside — but Ariadne is not there, not so early in the afternoon, and he never knew any of the other residents. Lighting up a cigarette, he imagines finding a directory, thumbing through the Cs until he found _Dominic et Malorie_  (was that even what ‘Mal’ was short for? he’s not sure he ever knew); he imagines making his way to their place, telling Cobb he heard, telling Cobb he wants to help. He imagines trying to explain that though he’s a thief and a gambler and, at times, a right bastard, he was also raised to honor debts that mean more than money. What he owes the Cobbs can probably never be repaid.  
  
But he’s scraping his cigarette into the ground with his heel, and he’s turning away from the building he hasn’t lived in for months, and he’s eyeing a beaten-up black motorbike parked across the street, because he knows he’s not going to find Dom Cobb tonight. He’ll steal the bike, the same as he once did as an angry fifteen-year-old, only this time he’ll get away with it. He’ll be there by sundown. He’ll see Arthur.  
  
You’d think he’d feel something about that, but, driving through Paris, all he feels is wind in his face. He knows he’s missed Arthur, remembering him in vivid flashes, seeing him sometimes in dreams, and yet never wanting him, never trusting himself to want him. Eames has the truth about himself branded on his body, and to want Arthur, to want anything, he has to forget that he is not the only inhabitant of his body that wants. He has to forget that when the wolf sheds blood, he sheds blood too. And how can he forget when all he remembers is Arthur, spread out beneath him, biting his mouth, bleeding where Eames’s nails scratched his skin?  
  
(Except, sometimes, he remembers Arthur winning at poker, and laughing, and calling Eames an idiot. Remembers him as not just Arthur, but Arthur darling. Sometimes, that’s even worse.)  
  
The bike is loud and slips a little at turns, the tires beginning to bald, but it’s light and it’s fast and he knows it will make it out to the country, even down that dangerous dirt lane. There, he will find elements that he can’t account for, can’t begin to imagine: Arthur, and his feelings for Arthur, and a whole house where his smell probably still lingers, on the stained basement floor, on the mattress where he slept; Cobb and Cobb’s grief, and the shadow of Mal everywhere; and Ariadne, somehow a part of everything. Eames accelerates with a turn of his wrist, and the pavement slides beneath him like water. In the lowering light, the road looks almost blue.  
  
Eames makes good time. When he brings the bike to a stop, the sun still hovers in the sky, not quite ducking beneath the horizon. The windows in the house are dark, curtained.  
  
He cuts through the lawn up to the house which is old but not historic, painted a color that is not quite white, with red on the trim — the same as he left it, the grass the very same color. He breathes out through his nose, softly, the sound reminding him of the ocean, or an airplane flying low over his flat in London. No time for thought, else he will never get inside. Eames closes his eyes. Opens them. Reaches for the door handle and twists it.  
  
The door opens, of course it opens. There is only one door in this house that needs to be locked.  
  
More coats hang in the foyer than usual, and a long pumpkin-orange scarf has slid off the one of the hooks on to the ground. They smell of Paris, of Ariadne. He wonders how often she is here. There is mud thickly crusted on a pair of rubber wellies lined up against the wall, left over from a rainy day that has long since passed.  
  
Someone moves in the darkness of the sitting room, a deliberately loud footfall from leather Oxfords that are always quiet. ‘Honey,’ Eames calls, but his voice threatens to break, ‘I’m home.’  
  
‘I could smell you a mile away,’ Arthur says, stepping into view.  
  
It should be no surprise that Arthur hasn’t changed, that he is every bit as pale and strangely, inhumanly handsome as he was when Eames left, with his hair slicked back and his mouth held tight in a line, and his tie knotted in a perfect Windsor knot. It should be no surprise, because of what Arthur is and what that is supposed to mean — but it does surprise Eames, stomach bottoming out at the sight, all queasy-hearted and thick-tongued, suddenly aware of the scruff on his face and the way his body has filled out on a Mombasa diet of drugs and booze and cheap, tasty food. Aware of the new scars cut like trenches across his skin, some of them still pink and raw beneath his fingertips.  
  
‘So,’ he says. He tries to smile.  
  
‘What are you doing here, Mr. Eames?’  
  
Eames doesn’t know how to explain, doesn’t know where to begin. The whole speech he imagined reciting to Cobb is a wisp in his brain, a cloud of words that he knows have no power to change the hardness is Arthur’s eyes. ‘Let me inside,’ he says finally.  
  
Despite his thinness, Arthur fills the whole frame of the entranceway to the rest of the house. He is determinedly blocking Eames from entering, a glacial barricade to a seat, a glass of water. Eames is jetlagged and moonlagged, but he must stand here and contend with Arthur’s dour face. Arthur’s coldness is not something he was prepared for. He’s not sure he was prepared for anything; he didn’t let himself give a single thought to what Arthur would say when he returned. He still doesn’t know what he wants Arthur to say, other than Come in.  
  
‘Why are you here?’ Arthur repeats.  
  
‘Arthur. You had to know I’d come. When Ariadne called me — ’  
  
‘I told her to leave you alone.’  
  
‘She thought I’d want to know about Mal. She was right.’ He hears the edge in his own voice. He tries to soften his tone, but fails. ‘I can’t even figure how Ariadne got caught up with all of this,’ he says. ‘Her boots are here. Does she live with you now?’  
  
‘No,’ Arthur says. ‘She lives with Dom.’  
  
Jesus Christ. He pictures her in that sad house, with that sad man, babysitting motherless children and trying her damndest to fix the unfixable. Eames manages to say, ‘She’s a student. She doesn’t need to be — ’   
  
‘You’re the one who told her about us.’ Arthur’s voice is enough to give Eames goosebumps. It’s enough to make all the air stick in his lungs. Arthur’s eyes, sharp as his teeth, slice Eames right through.  
  
There is a sound from behind Arthur, a quiet, sleepy voice that asks, ‘Is someone here?’  
  
Arthur turns, and in his turning, his expression shifts, becomes easier and more unrecognizable to Eames. He knows this Arthur, but he has almost forgotten him: the Arthur who first carried him up the stairs, who did not smile but approached him with a kind of dutiful protectiveness. And, like that, it hits Eames that he is not the only werewolf in the house.  
  
He should have smelled it, but he was too distracted by the old, familiar scents of this house, overpowering in their currency, unfaded by the course of a year. Only now does the wolf’s scent burst in Eames’s nostrils, fur and blood and fear all mixed together. It almost bowls him over, the scent, the realization, the sound of the wolf speaking: ‘Who’s that?’ He turns on the light.  
  
He’s a young man with prominent cheekbones and blue eyes, his pretty face bisected by a telltale scar. He’s wearing striped pajamas, the kind only people in movies or the very wealthy wear, a little bit loose and buttoned to his clavicle. Eames doesn’t know for sure, but he’d guess the pajamas are silk.  
  
‘Mr. Fischer,’ Arthur says. ‘This is Mr. Eames. A former associate.’  
  
Fischer looks skeptical — not unintelligent then, at least — but he nods politely and asks, ‘What time is it? Have you let me sleep all day?’  
  
Brat, Eames thinks.  
  
‘I tried to wake you up. In case you’ve forgotten, you need some time to recover.’  
  
Fischer’s eyes burn for a moment, like Arthur has let some precious secret loose, but he must know what Eames is. Standing so close, so shortly after the moon: they both feel the scratch of the wolf at their bones. But then Fischer wilts, nods, says, ‘Yes, of course.’ Eames smells something else on him, salty and sour, the same scent of his mother’s grave — a hollow, inexplicable grief, fierce enough to stink.  
  
He disappears back into the house that Eames cannot enter, saying something about calling his driver. Eames wrinkles his nose; he catches Arthur doing the same. ‘You smell it too,’ he says, and Arthur, bowing his head, says, ‘His father just died.’  
  


&

  
When Fischer is on his way out — a leather duffel in tow, his face bright with washing and his clothes looking freshly pressed — Arthur finally steps aside to let Eames pass. He doesn’t say anything. There is no question of poker or tea, just silence that holds them both fast, Eames sitting in an armchair, Arthur leaning against a wall. They look at each other without seeing each other. Every time Eames thinks about speaking, his throat constricts around the words. He watches the minute movements of Arthur’s shadow against the wall; he watches the light shine over the leather of his shoes.  
  
Around nine, he falls asleep, a shallow sleep, still aware of Arthur’s presence, but he wakes with a kick when he hears someone say his name. In the space between unconsciousness and consciousness, that split-second of confusion, he thinks it is Mal, not a vampire but a ghost, haunting him. When he opens his eyes, he sees Ariadne.  
  
She stands between Arthur and Cobb, between a vampire and a paranormal researcher, and she looks stronger than either of them simply by the tilt of her jaw. There is a solidness to her features that sharp, unreal Arthur lacks; there is a wholeness to her that Cobb, wrecked, will probably never have again. (He hides it behind a suit jacket and newly grown facial hair, but Eames can smell it on him, that he has been wrecked completely.)  
  
‘You’re an asshole,’ Ariadne says, though the last word is muffled by Eames putting his arms around her. Funny how much he missed her and never even realized. Those evenings spent together in the boarding house, talking about nothing, laughing at nothing, a friendship built on nothing but a shared language — it all feels so far away. He never thought he’d be so happy to see her.  
  
‘I’m glad you’re okay,’ she says when he lets her go. Her face smiles up at him. ‘I’m glad you’re back.’  
  
Eames can’t look at Cobb when he says, ‘Wish it wasn’t like this.’ He can’t look at Cobb, not until he fits his fingers over the moons on his arm, until he finds words that aren’t entirely inadequate. He settles on: ‘What can I do?’  
  
‘Is that why you’re here, Eames? To help?’ Cobb looks at him, and so does Arthur, their faces held in identical, unreadable expressions. Unwilling to believe, Eames thinks; unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt.  
  
‘Course it is,’ he says. ‘Soon as I heard, I knew I had to come.’  
  
‘You’re sure Mombasa wasn’t just boring you?’ Arthur’s eyes are like the flash of metal in the lamplight.  
  
‘If you’d rather I left,’ Eames begins, not meaning it — of course he won’t leave, not now that he’s just returned — but the threat is clawing to get out of his mouth, clawing at Arthur, hoping for a reaction.  
  
But it’s Cobb who says, ‘No.’ He scrubs at his face and then collapses onto the sofa so heavily that it’s unclear how he managed to stand all this time. ‘No,’ he repeats, the word sounding faraway. He turns his face to Eames, and it is the face of a different man, a different Dom Cobb, someone older and harder and twisted up with love, twisted up with Mal — so much less certain that he is really alive, that he is really human, hunting the same answers Eames and Arthur and now Mal must hunger for.  
  
‘Thanks for coming,’ Cobb says. ‘I think you can help.’  
  
As he talks, about Mal and his plans to find her, to save her, about his connections with the same mysterious Mr. Saito that Nash mentioned, about serums and formulas and experiments, about cures, the line of Arthur’s mouth turns down and Ariadne’s eyes lower to the floor, and Eames tries to understand what he is hearing. A cure, like Mal is sick, diseased, rather than irreversibly transformed. Can Cobb really believe she’ll be cured?  
  
There is nothing that can be done for her, not like that, and soon enough someone will have to tell Cobb. But Eames does not think she is lost forever, either. Maybe he’s the only one who sees it, that Arthur is a vampire, that Arthur doesn’t have to forfeit everything simply because of it, that there is a way to be what you are without giving up who you are. Eames knows that for every part of himself that is the wolf, he must remember that the wolf is also him.  
  


&

  
The first time Eames sees Mal since her transformation, he has been in France a week and Arthur has not looked at him in two days. He sleeps in a guest room in the country house, not the same one where he used to sleep, the one now thick with the scent of Fischer, but a two-windowed, white-walled room without a dresser — not that Eames has any plans to unpack, not while Arthur remains so chilly. During the day, Eames sometimes bikes down the long country lane at breakneck speeds, swerving so quickly down the third intersection he hits that it makes his heart stop for a second. It is the jolt he needs to wake himself up: in the gloom of Arthur’s house, he sometimes feels like he’s dreaming.   
  
Twice now, in the late hours of the afternoon, before Cobb comes over to strategize and before Arthur abandons the darkness of his room, Ariadne has stopped by to catch up. She talked about the confusion of the Cobb children, and with a twist of his stomach, Eames heard their names, James and Phillipa, for the first time. Ariadne told him that her own mother died when she was eight. Cancer. Her father remarried three years later, to a very nice woman, but Ariadne was too old; it wasn’t the same. There was nothing Eames could say to that, no words he could form, not even to let her know that he understands.  
  
Today, she tells him how she ended up involved with Arthur and the Cobbs. ‘I gave you their names in case of an emergency,’ Eames reminds her, but she waves her hand and says, ‘It  _was_  an emergency. I thought you were in trouble. I thought they might have answers.’ Apparently she took a shine to Cobb, who did architecture in school too, and soon enough she was babysitting the little ones, and working shifts during the full moon, and she planted a vegetable garden in Arthur’s backyard, and when Mal was turned, it only made sense to move in with Cobb. To keep an eye on the children. To keep an eye on him. ‘He’s falling apart,’ she says, voice whispery soft but not remotely uncertain. ‘He’s falling apart, and everyone can see it but him.’  
  
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Eames says. He runs his finger over the warm rim of his mug. Remembers the distant look on Cobb’s face, the effort it seemed to take him to keep his thoughts together. ‘I think he knows.’  
  
They drink the coffee Ariadne has brewed, and wait for Arthur to wake up.  
  
Cobb lets himself in to the house just after nightfall. James and Phillipa, whose names are like drumbeats in Eames’s ears, whose names he can’t stop thinking, are with their grandparents. Cobb unbuttons his coat but doesn’t remove it. ‘Let’s begin,’ he says straight off, before he realizes: ‘Where’s Arthur?’  
  
But Arthur comes round the corner just then, wearing a waistcoat but no jacket, his thin black notebook in his hand. In that notebook, Arthur has made meticulous notes of their discussions, the ideas they have proposed and rejected, the ways they could lure Mal to them and the ways they could convince her to let them help her. Cobb has a speech rehearsed, something about waiting for a train; it sounds nice enough but it doesn’t make much sense to Eames, who has been in love a handful of times but who has never been a husband, a father, a soulmate, a partner.   
  
He looks at the top of Arthur’s dark head, bent over his notebook, heart like a stone between his obsolete lungs. The sound of his pen scratching over the paper, the sight of his white scalp, the smell of him, the enormity of his silence and his coldness and his anger that has hardened to apathy are suddenly too much for Eames.  
  
He stands, excusing himself for a cigarette, and fumbles his way outside. Not quite in control of his fingers, nervous, shaky things that they are, it takes a minute to get his lighter on, his cigarette lit. The inhale like the taste of fire, the taste of the air in his mother’s flat, all nicotine-hazed. The exhale too much like a cry.  
  
In the course of their talks, Ariadne has never asked Eames why he left. No one has. They know what they know, that he fucked and he nearly killed and he ran; they know that he’s a coward. That’s enough.  
  
A shadow darkens the ground in front of him to blackness. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ says Mal. She’s standing before him, looming over where he sits on the porch. She looks the same but somehow sharper, like a camera too much in focus. She’s wearing all black, just like the last time he saw her; she’s still wearing her wedding ring. He blinks at her. She says, ‘Why have you returned, Mr. Eames?’  
  
‘Mal.’ He takes a drag of his cigarette, his shaking hands crumbling the whitened ash at the tip. ‘I’m here to see you. Rumor has it you’ve had a bit of an accident.’  
  
At the base of her throat, he sees two perfect puncture marks. He thinks he sees her hesitate, and it is like he knows her mind in that moment, knows the bloodlust and the affection that have become impossibly linked, knows that right now, she could kill him, bleed him dry, not in spite of the fact the he was once her friend, but because of it. Because he would not stop her if she tried. Because that, too, is part of what he owes, if it is what she wants.  
  
Her hand wraps around his throat, lifting him up. ‘You must bring my husband to me.’  
  
‘He — ’ Eames gasps for air and she loosens her grip, lowering his feet to the ground. ‘He wants to — to see you. He’s right inside, Mal.’  
  
‘ _Non_.’ She shakes her head, and then in English: ‘No. In three days it is our anniversary. I wish to meet him then. I will meet him here, on Tuesday, in this yard, one hour before dawn.’ She is the most beautiful, most powerful woman he’s ever seen, more beautiful and more powerful now than in her previous life, but where there was once joy in her face, there is now only anger edging toward madness.  
  
‘You’ll tell him?’   
  
Eames nods, and she is gone: vanished into shadows, leaving behind only a shimmer of darkness where she once was.  
  
Legs giving out, he slumps back to the ground and picks up his fallen cigarette. It’s still burning a low orange. He inhales. Touches his throat. Touches his tattoo. Exhales.  
  
The door behind him bangs open. ‘Eames!’ says Arthur, voice packed tight in a way Eames has never heard from him before, and, tilting his head back, Eames sees that Arthur’s usual calm has slipped — his brow is ridged, his mouth open, eyes bright and looking right at him. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.  
  
‘Been better,’ Eames manages.  
  
Arthur’s gaze flickers across the dark landscape. ‘She was here.’  
  
‘Got it in one.’   
  
‘It’s a miracle she didn’t kill you. Newborns can’t control their hunger.’  
  
Arthur sounds a little dazed, but Eames’s reply is easy: ‘I always knew Lady Luck was on my side.’ He takes another drag.  
  
With a short, impatient sound, Arthur pulls the cigarette out from between Eames’s lips and stomps it underfoot. ‘No wonder I didn’t smell her at first,’ he says. ‘Your cigarettes smell like shit.’ Maybe it’s just his giddiness that Mal didn’t kill him, but Eames thinks Arthur is almost smiling. He thinks Arthur is just a little bit glad he’s still alive.  
  
Giving him a hand, Arthur helps Eames to his feet before they pass back through the door. They return to the kitchen, where Eames tells Cobb and Ariadne what happened, where they dial and redial Mr. Saito in the hopes some new trial has been conducted, new results have come in. They return to the kitchen, and Arthur’s iciness settles over him again, his eyes avoiding Eames’s eyes, his mouth avoiding his name, but Eames remembers the way his own blood rose to meet the promise of Arthur’s outstretched hand, rose like an offering, a gift.  
  


&

  
‘I fear it sounds naïve, but I always thought they’d get a happy ending.’ Eames puts the kettle on the stove, turns the heat on. It’s early evening, Monday night. In nine hours, Mal will arrive. He doesn’t touch his shoulder — it’s not meant to be a good luck charm — but he wishes he did have some kind of totem to wish on. Something solid he could grasp in his hand.  
  
He thinks about asking Arthur to play poker later. He thinks Arthur might agree, just for the distraction.  
  
‘Is that naïve?’ he asks Arthur, who has not eaten tonight, who will not leave the house tonight.  
  
‘Yes,’ says Arthur, finally breaking his silence, though his eyes remain hard and unseeing. ‘But you’re not the only one.’ From one of the shelves he pulls down a blue teacup. He sets it on the counter for Eames, and it feels somehow like an admonishment. ‘It’s amazing the ways we can fool ourselves.’  
  


&

  
They deal Ariadne in when she arrives just after midnight, and after a rough start, she makes back everything she lost plus some. ‘Beginner’s luck,’ says Eames, wishing he could smile at her. Wishing this felt like any of their previous games, like it’s more than just a distraction, a pretense at normalcy. Cobb shows up last. He carries flowers in his arms as if it really is an anniversary date, dressed up in a tailored black jacket with a thick black tie. Eames wants both to roll his eyes and to cry, but he settles for clearing the cards and the chips from the table.  
  
While he’s shuffling the cards back into their deck, he hears Arthur ask if Cobb wants him to be there, but Cobb says no, says he wants Arthur to wait inside, that everything will be fine, he promises. From the corner of his eye, Eames can see that Arthur doesn’t look pleased, but he’s resigned. They say once a soldier always a soldier; Arthur still knows how to follow orders.  
  
Ariadne tries her hand at comfort, too, touches Cobb’s forearm with a gentle hand. ‘This is what you’ve been preparing for,’ she reminds Cobb, and he bends down to kiss her forehead.  
  
Eames doesn’t know what to say to Cobb, so he doesn’t say anything at all. In the shine of the tea kettle, which he refills at the sink, he notices Arthur watching him, his eyebrows held tight over his eyes; but when Eames turns, Arthur is talking to Ariadne, voice low, engaged, as if they’ve been speaking all along.  
  
They sit. They sip their teas and coffees, not quite making conversation but not quite falling into silence, barely knowing what they’re waiting for, but waiting, waiting, waiting nevertheless. Waiting until —  
  
‘Something’s wrong,’ Arthur says. He tilts his head, considering for a second, and Eames’s chest contracts with anxiety. Arthur jumps to his feet. ‘No,  _no_ , not good.’  
  
‘What is it?’  
  
Arthur rounds on Eames. His eyes are bright, burning, the ice gone. ‘Can’t you smell it? Can’t you smell him?’ He drags Eames out of his chair by his lapels. ‘For god’s sake, you worthless dog — ’  
  
It hits Eames. ‘Oh, bloody  _fuck_.’ He struggles out of Arthur’s hold and they rush to the door together, Cobb and Ariadne confused but following close behind. Doesn’t make any sense, the scent in the air; it can’t be right. Yet it’s overpowering, a smell like damp fur and spilled blood, like expensive leather shoes.  
  
Eames almost breaks the door getting it open, and then he freezes. Mal stands in the yard, Robert Fischer unconscious and bleeding at her feet, and from the porch, Eames notices a bite on his wrist, on his neck, on the exposed skin of his chest. The smell of a dying werewolf, in this moonless context, is like a kick to the stomach, and he nearly doubles over with it. Arthur, at his side, shakes his head dazedly — hungry, Eames realizes, resisting the lure of free-flowing blood.  
  
Cobb pushes through, leaving the three of them standing on the porch. ‘Jesus, Mal,’ he begins. ‘What have you done?’  
  
Tall, lovely, pale beneath the moon — Mal seems more like a goddess than a vampire, but her petulant tone as she calls out to her husband is unexpected. ‘You want to take me away. Do experiments like the ones my father did on Arthur. You think you can fix me.’  
  
‘It’s not like that.’  
  
Eames knows it is like that, just like that, but he remembers that he never confronted Cobb. Never explained about his tattoo, what it means. Never told him to talk to Arthur, who knows that there is no going back. Who told him as much, once upon a waning moon.  
  
‘I won’t let you take me, Dom. Stay away,’ Mal says, ‘or I will kill this boy. Maybe I will make him like me.’  
  
Arthur stirs, leans forward. ‘You can’t turn him, Mal,’ he calls to her. His voice is tired, old — Eames realizes he never thought to ask how old Arthur really is. Never even wondered when he became what he is. ‘He’s a werewolf,’ Arthur explains, looking straight ahead, but it’s like Eames can feel his eyes anyway, it’s like Eames can feel his touch when he continues, ‘We don’t have the power to change a werewolf.’ In his tone, there is something heavy.  
  
‘Arthur,’ Eames says, and Arthur’s head tilts toward Eames, his mouth straightened into a line. The world feels like it’s trembling, tumbling, and Eames doesn’t know why, unless it’s him, unless he’s tremblingly reaching for Arthur, tremblingly waiting for Arthur to speak. But Arthur steps away, his head snapping back to the Cobbs, who stare at each other across Fischer, shallow-breathing and seeping red.  
  
Eames squares his feet, stabilizes himself. Looks at Mal, who is shaking her head.  
  
‘Can imagine how it is,’ she says to Cobb, ‘to love you so much and to dream of killing you? I want to turn you, Dom. I want you to be like me. And the children, I want to make them like me, too.’ (Eames remembers their names: James and Phillipa, James and Philippa, names like monarchs, destined for greatness.)  
  
From behind, Dom looks strong, but Eames can smell his tears. ‘You know you can’t do that. Not the kids.’  
  
‘Can you imagine how I must feel?’ Her cheeks are wet now, too. ‘Do you know how it hurts?’ Eames wants to tell her that what she is does not have to be who she is, not completely, that her life before doesn’t have to be lost entirely. That she is the vampire now, but the vampire is also her. But the words sound hollow. Maybe there is no Mal anymore, no vampire — no Eames, no wolf — just the hybrid, the constant new identity. A singular, not a plural.  
  
‘You’re waiting for a train,’ Cobb tries to say.  
  
‘No,’ she says. The word is so pointed that it is a weapon unto itself. ‘It is obsession. I smell you on everything, I hear you, I see you, I want to touch you, I want to break you, I imagine how you must taste. I know I love you — still so much. But I know where this train is going.’ She takes a step forward. ‘I will kill you.’   
  
A gasp of breath, a tug at Eames’s arm, and Ariadne runs on to the lawn. Arthur has to curl a firm hand around Eames’s forearm to keep him from following her, his brutal fingers scoring lines in Eames’s skin. ‘Don’t,’ Ariadne says to Mal. Cobb tries to push her back, but she says, ‘You can’t kill him. You wouldn’t.  _Mal_  wouldn’t.’   
  
Brave girl, Eames thinks, the thought like an egg of worry in his throat.  
  
Mal looks at Ariadne for a long moment, before, black skirt trailing, Mal steps over Fischer. Steps, steps, forward and forward again, until she towers over Ariadne, who is protected only by Cobb’s arm across her body. ‘You are correct,’ she says at last. ‘Mal would not. Mal could not. But I cannot stand this hunger any longer.’  
  
‘Then what, Mal?’ asks Cobb, the crack that runs through his heart extending to his voice, his words. ‘What will you do?’ But Eames and Arthur have already realized, have already noticed the western horizon, the sun that has begun to climb in the sky.  
  
Eames’s heart drums in his chest, a sudden and explosive rhythm. He has trouble breathing. He watches Cobb grab Mal’s hands, knows he must be speaking though his voice is too low, too ragged to be heard. Eames can imagine what he’s saying, how he’s begging. Talking about love, about children. Talking about trains. She has seconds before the light spills over her body, mere seconds — but Eames must turn away, must turn around, because Arthur too has seconds only.  
  
Behind Eames, Mal is speaking her last words, crying her last tears, but Eames will not witness them. He sees instead the expression on Arthur’s face. He mouth is set, his eyes flinty. And Eames knows, suddenly, what Arthur is thinking, that if he’s fast enough, if he  _tries_ ; knows that in a split-second Arthur will run toward Cobb and Mal. Toward the light of the sun. He’ll never make it, he can’t save her, and Eames growls, ‘You have to go inside,’ but Arthur is already in motion, prepared to barrel through Eames if necessary. Prepared to honor his debt to the Cobbs.  
  
With the heat of the invading sun at his back and the wolf roaring loud through his veins, Eames throws all of his weight into the tackle, pushing him into the door, which rattles on its hinges and falls open. They land on the ground, just inside the shadowed foyer, Eames breathing hot across Arthur’s face for a moment before Arthur throws him off, into the wall, and leaps to his feat.  
  
But it’s too late. Cobb is crying into his hands. Ariadne is clenching her fists. Arthur is standing in the dark safety of his house, staring out into the yard where Mal’s ashes lie heaped beside the still-living body of Robert Fischer.   
  
Eames staggers up in time for Arthur’s blow to collide with his jaw. He goes sprawling across the floor. ‘You  _bastard_ , you fucking — ’ Arthur is panting, though he has no need for breath, probably out of habit more than anything else. His suit is disheveled, his hair falling into his face. ‘I could’ve — ’  
  
‘You could’ve what?’ Eames bites out. He rubs his jaw. ‘She wanted it to happen this way. Her life as Mal was over.’  
  
‘I know. But she could’ve started a new life.’ His eyes all darkness. His mouth like a gash across his face. ‘I couldn’t help Mal, but I could’ve helped  _her_. But you — ’  
  
‘I saved your life, you ungrateful arse. You would’ve been incinerated too.’  
  
Arthur sneers. ‘And if I had been? Explain to me how that’s your concern.’  
  
‘Call me selfish, but I don’t want you to watch you die, Arthur.’  
  
‘No,’ Arthur snaps, ‘you just want to fuck me then run off to Africa.’  
  
Eames head aches from hitting the floor, and his jaw clicks every time he opens his mouth, and his mind goes white at Arthur’s words, unable to believe them, unable to parse them. He digs the heel of his hand into his eye and says, each word slow and crisp, ‘I almost  _killed_  you. Dying for my fucking orgasm, dying for Cobb’s dead fucking wife. Quit throwing yourself in the line of fire.’ He glares up at Arthur. ‘No one’s asking you to die for them.’  
  
Arthur blinks, face darkly lined with shadows and impossible to understand, and when he speaks, his voice is even: ‘How did you think this would go down, Eames? I can’t change you, and you can’t change me. The best we can do is kill each other.’  
  
Before Eames can answer, before Eames can even begin to piece words together, Arthur leaves. He walks away, his shoes silent as ever on the hardwood floor.  
  
Standing, Eames glances out of the broken door, sees Cobb bent over Mal’s ashes, still crying; he sees Ariadne checking on Fischer. He thinks about going outside, helping them, but he can’t face it yet. He limps to the kitchen for ice for his jaw. He notices the bouquet of flowers laying across the table, tied at the bottom with a blue ribbon, and he smells them, breathing once, very deeply, before he opens the lid of the garbage bin and crushes them inside. He tries to wash the scent of the petals from his hands, but it lingers with him all day, sweet but dying.  
  
  
  


_v. hey hey my playmate_

  
Eames slides  _A Passage to India_  into the blank space it left on the bookshelf, and he wonders if Arthur ever noticed it was gone. He wonders if Arthur’s ever opened it. Eames has read it a handful of times now, on airplanes and spread out on his bed in Mombasa and on the green sofa in Yusuf’s shop and in the guest room at Arthur’s where he’s been staying; he’s read it again and again, the sharp sentences, those final unhappy pages, the inscription on the inside cover signed  _Love, Mom_ , and he does not want to read it again. He will not read it again.  
  
His fingers touch the indentation of the letters on the book’s spine. They almost feel like scars.  
  
It’s nearing evening, and Eames has spent the day packing and unpacking his bag. Unlike everyone else, he has nothing to do, nowhere to go. Fischer was carted away in an ambulance, taken (Cobb said) to a hospital owned by Mr. Saito, where he can recover discreetly. Cobb returned home to tell his children something, to explain to his father-in-law what happened, to touch all the things in the house that remind him of her, and to spend a sleepless night in bed, remembering when they were first married. Ariadne followed him there, to the bedroom she’s been given, just across the from the children, where she will allow herself to finally cry.  
  
But Eames has stayed behind, in this house, walking the halls, running the taps, marching the steps down to the basement and up again, opening all the doors — all save the door to Arthur’s room, which he can’t commit himself to touch. Every part of him still reverberates with Arthur’s fist, Arthur’s words. The best they can do is kill each other. Eames lets his hand hover over the doorknob, but he doesn’t turn it.  
  
He packs and unpacks his bag, thinks about the motorcycle parked out front, thinks about how long it would take him to get out of the country. Thinks about Arthur, the clutch of his powerful hands. Thinks about Mal’s wish to turn her family, and Cobb’s broken-hearted refusal. Would he have said no? (It doesn’t matter: he can’t be changed. The best they can do is kill each other.)  
  
Back to Mombasa, then, to Yusuf’s drugs and petty theft? It was a way of life, and not such a bad one. He made more money than usual at the casinos there, because losing wasn’t half as fun when he wasn’t losing to Arthur. Will he return there, then?  
  
No.  
  
It all sounds perfectly fine, nothing to thumb his nose at — but he knows he will dream of Arthur, he will crave Arthur. He will hunt for Arthur in crowds, hunger for him, hunger for the taste of his mouth, his body, his borrowed blood. He will always be tasting Arthur on the air, waiting for him, wanting him.  
  
Dark has fallen, and Eames pulls the curtains open wide to let the moonlight in, the glow of it touching him but not burning him, not for several more weeks now. He closes his eyes. Breathes deep. In his left hand he holds his little pocketknife with its sharp little blade, and, opening his eyes, letting the air escape from his lungs, he slices the blade across his palm, quick enough that the blood takes a moment to well. He clenches his fist and more blood drips out between his fingers, down his wrist. Its scent is sharp in the air; its color is red like one of Ariadne’s scarves.  
  
When Arthur rouses, as he soon must, the smell of Eames pulling him to life, Eames will not just hold out his palm, he will hand over his whole body. Arthur, who has not eaten in two nights, who will be craving Eames the way Eames craves him, wholly, bodily, inescapably — he will take Eames. He will devour him. Eames will kiss Arthur with an open mouth, bleed into him, lose all of his breath inside of him. He’ll say, ‘It’s the best we can do,’ Arthur clutching at his arms, his shoulder, his back, and then Eames will feel the fangs pierce his throat, feel the blood bloom from his veins and between the warmth of Arthur’s lips.   
  
And if Arthur takes it all, if he feeds until his hunger is sated, Eames will fall beneath his mouth. He will grow weak in Arthur’s tightening grip, dimming, drowning, the scent of himself becoming the scent of Arthur, the scent of their shared blood enveloping him. And if he wakes, he will wake with fingerprints painted across his skin, black like the ink of tattoos.


End file.
